


Case #0001703—“Language Acquisition”

by Cassiodorus



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, Horror, Languages and Linguistics, Original Statement, Psychic Abilities, Statement Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-24
Updated: 2020-01-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 08:53:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22393405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cassiodorus/pseuds/Cassiodorus
Summary: Statement of Nathaniel Lockheed, regarding his interactions with fellow polyglot Anthony Davis and the mental effects that followed.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	Case #0001703—“Language Acquisition”

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Nathaniel Lockheed, regarding his interactions with fellow polyglot Anthony Davis and the mental effects that followed. Original statement given March 17th, 2001. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins:

ARCHIVIST (READING STATEMENT)

You know, most folks assume I became a polyglot because I’m one of those people who picks up languages easily—I’m not, and there are plenty of language systems that I really struggle with, though I can’t deny that I love the satisfaction that comes with pinning down a particularly tricky tense. I suppose that I decided to really become involved with the community shortly after I started learning Norwegian. It was the third language I had picked up—I was raised speaking English and Arabic, which makes Norwegian the first language I learned in more of an academic setting. I’m not sure what familiarity you have with Norwegian, but it’s radically different from the languages I knew already. And that was when it clicked: there was something about discovering up an entirely new set of sentence structures, grammatical rules, even sounds, that felt like I was getting a glimpse into a completely new way of thinking. But there was something else too: as I dove deeper and deeper into the language, there also came a certain power in mastering something that had once seemed so strange and unfamiliar. And as I learned more and more languages, it honestly felt a bit like I was…filling into my body more. Using the entirety of my vocal tract instead of the small section I once knew, capable of producing a wild range of sounds, able to see the world through so many lenses of so many languages, it almost felt like I was…meeting my full potential, in a way. Sorry, I always forget how snooty that sounds in English—I swear it comes across better in Japanese. And I’m off on a tangent anyways, I know I’m supposed to be telling you about my “experience.”

It was in July of 2000, at the St. Petersburg Conference for European Polyglots. I had just wrapped up my doctoral thesis a few months prior— I studied sociology, and I had been researching the role of the Orthodox church in modern Ethiopia, so I had spent the past few years completely immersed in my Ge’ez source base. Anyways, I hadn’t done much socializing at all around the end of my thesis, let alone meetups within the Polyglot community, so I jumped at the opportunity to reconnect with some of the people I’d fallen out of touch with. While I did get to see old friends, there were also a lot of new faces, which is to be expected at an international event like this. Though I made plenty new acquaintances that day, especially when the conference took a break for lunch, there was one person who stood out to me: he was a stocky man around my age, with dark, curly hair and a neatly kept beard. Admittedly, I did mainly notice him because I found him really handsome, but there was another thing.

See, the catering company they had hired for the event was a local business, and it seemed that only those on the customer-facing side of things had any knowledge of English. Many of the actual waitstaff only spoke Russian, which wasn’t a problem for most of us when we needed to know where the beverages were, what ingredients were in a dish—if someone didn’t know Russian themselves, they could easily find someone who did, as we all had these cute little name tags with little national flag stickers to designate what languages we spoke. However, as I saw this stranger looking desperately at the waitstaff, then pointing at the food, I realized two things. One, he clearly didn’t know Russian. Two, his name tag was almost completely covered in those little flag stickers. Given the state of his name tag, I chalked him up to be some prankster who had snuck in and was ready to dismiss him. But then he spotted me and frantically waved me over—I wasn’t standing very far away, and he must have seen the little Russian flag on my name badge. He introduced himself as Anthony Davis, and asked me to figure out if there was shellfish in any of the dishes. After a bit of conversation with the waiter, was able to show Anthony which dishes were safe to eat. He thanked me and hurried off, and I figured that was the last of it—decided to tuck it away in my memory as a funny anecdote I could tell friends later that evening.

I had plans to go out drinking with a few old friends after the conference. There was a nightclub nearby, and though I worried I would stand out among what seemed to be a largely undergraduate crowd, any anxieties I had disappeared after the first few shots. About a half hour after we got there, I noticed Anthony out in the crowd, dancing with a young woman who looked like she may have snuck in with a fake ID. I could tell she was trying to talk to—or rather, shout to—him, her bright and bubbly Russian seeming to blend in with the electronic music that was playing. But as I saw him, he saw me too, and I noticed a strange look in his eye: it was a look of alarm tinted with the first signs of dismay, like the kind you get from your friends when you walk in on a surprise party they’d been setting up for you. But it only lasted a second before I saw him and the girl move deeper into the swarm of dancing people, and I put it out of my mind as soon as I had lost sight of them.

I eventually got up to get some water from the bar—I had my flight back to England the next afternoon, and figured I should start trying to sober up sooner rather than later. As I waited for the bartender, I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned around to see Anthony. I couldn’t help but arch an eyebrow as I noticed messy smears of lipstick around his mouth—it does always surprise me, what messages we’re capable of passing through a language barrier. He asked if I was the one who had helped him earlier at the conference, and I confirmed that I was. I wanted to ask him about his name tag—surely, it had to have been a prank, as it looked like there were upwards of 30 stickers on it—but the music was too loud, and I knew it would be impossible to get an intelligible answer in a place like this, so I decided to abandon my water and ask him to go outside with me to talk. To my surprise, he suggested we go to his hotel room instead; even more surprising, I agreed.

As we left, I noticed a young woman outside the bar, grunting at the bouncer and gesturing wildly around her. She looked familiar, and I couldn’t place her until Anthony glanced over at the scene and began to quicken his pace—he said she was the girl he’d danced with earlier, and that he decided to back off when he noticed that she was way more drunk than he had initially realized. At that point we spotted a taxi, and got a ride to Anthony’s hotel. Though the evening did end as you might be imagining—I promise I won’t go into detail on that—it started with an academic discussion. I gave him a brief synopsis of my research, and his eyes lit up when I mentioned my sources in Ge’ez. He then told me that he was a linguist himself, and that, though he’d always been interested in the Horn of Africa, he’d always had such trouble learning the languages of the area. Or…no, not learning. He didn’t say learning. He said “collecting.”

After talking a bit about his own research—something about spelling patterns in old English that, I’ll be honest, sounded horribly convoluted—he explained that he’d started interacting with the polyglot community as a way of “adding new pieces to his voice.” The phrasing stuck out to me because, as he rendered it in beautiful Vietnamese, it captured exactly the way language acquisition had always felt to me: like an expansion of self. Or at least, it felt beautiful at the time—now it just makes me want to be sick.

After this point, the evening started to get more intimate, and while I don’t want to get too detailed, there is one thing that now seems deeply important: the first time he kissed me, I could feel my brain…shift. I know, that sounds strange, but the alcohol had mostly worn off by that point, so I know what I felt, and I know that it’s important to tell you about it. It started with tension, like pulling on a knot and feeling it untangle, leaving only a small pile of loose string behind. It was actually kind of a nice feeling, though a bit disorienting. I obviously didn’t say anything in the moment, and after we’d finished having sex, I walked back to my hotel.

It was earlier than I would have expected, just after midnight, so I decided to pre-pack a few things to make for lighter work in the morning. I had my suitcase pretty well stuffed, and was working on my carryon when I started to realize what had gone wrong—what had gone so, so wrong. See, I like to read when I travel, so I always keep a book or two in my carryon. But as I got my things together, I found that there was one book I didn’t recognize. Or—it wasn’t that I didn’t recognize it, really. The design of the cover was one I knew well, as I had started reading it the week before. It was that I couldn’t read the title. A pit of dread opened in my stomach as I realized I couldn’t even recognize the language. It featured tall, looping letters that felt deeply familiar in a way I couldn’t place. I knew that I knew the book. I knew that I knew the language. I knew I had just been reading it a few days before, but…in that moment, it seemed so completely foreign to me, and that not-knowing sent a cold, seeping dread all through my body. I know now, of course, that it was a text in Ge’ez, though I still have trouble believing that. I mean, I spent almost seven years of my life immersed in the language, learning every grammatical structure and a wide breadth of its vocabulary, reading so much of it that I even started seeing Ge’ez writing in my dreams, and I was wholly fluent in it…until I wasn’t. Until I just didn’t know it anymore. It’s completely gone, and the worst part is that I can’t even re-learn it: every time I try, the rules just slip from my mind, and every word spoken comes out as a pathetic grunting noise, like my throat can’t produce the right sounds anymore.

I slumped to the floor, my back against the hotel bed as I processed what was happening—forgetting a whole language at once. Or, no. Un-knowing a language. It’s hard to explain what processing the un-knowing of a language feels like. It was almost as if a part of my brain had just disappeared, and the rest just… coiled in to fill the gap without mourning what was gone. It took a long time before I could get to sleep that night, but I knew I needed rest before a long day of travel. If I’m honest, part of me expected that I would wake up and everything would go back to normal—maybe it had just been the alcohol, or a memory blank after a long day. God, I wish it had just been any of those things, anything but what it was.

On my way to the airport the next day, I decided to stop in at a small, old-looking café near the hotel. I picked up my latte and was about to leave, when I noticed Anthony standing in line. I was worried that I would have to awkwardly make small talk with him, but then his turn came up, and I listened in horror as he gave his coffee order to the barista in bright, bubbly Russian. It was only then that I thought back to the nightclub, and felt myself begin to grow sick as I remembered the girl I’d seen outside. I suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about the way she wordlessly, helplessly, frantically gestured. I couldn’t stop thinking about the horrible grunting sound that she made. And although I carried the coffee with me all the way to the airport, I eventually had to abandon it, as my stomach wouldn’t stop turning. I don’t know if you’re one for clubbing, but I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve kissed a stranger in some dark corner of a loud, throbbing club… without ever needing to say a word to them.

ARCHIVIST

Statement ends.

Given the semi-drunken state that Dr. Lockheed was in at the time of the encounter, I find it difficult to put much stock in his statement. Still, we can at least verify the basic details. Sasha was able to confirm that there was a conference for polyglots during the date provided, and that both Nathaniel Lockheed and Anthony Davis were registered attendees. She also looked into Mr. Lockheed’s academic record, and was able to acquire a copy of his doctoral thesis, which she says would absolutely require a strong knowledge of Ge’ez. Dr. Lockheed has denied our requests for a follow-up interview, stating that he has quit the polyglot community for good and left academia for a career in financial analysis.

Dr. Davis, on the other hand, proves interesting. It seems he has become quite a prominent linguist, with a tenured professorship with Heidelberg University and several published books. We attempted to contact him for a follow-up interview, with no luck—he explained that he’s currently writing a book on language acquisition, and that he won’t interrupt his research for anything. There is nothing exceptional about his academic interests, except perhaps for their breadth.

There’s one other thing though. While Tim was digging through Dr. Davis’ extensive academic record, he found a copy of Davis’ CV dating back to the mid 1990s. In the section on speaking events, Dr. Davis lists a panel hosted by King’s College in October 2002. It was an academic discussion on the modern use of various Semitic languages. Dr. Davis is listed as a fluent speaker of Ge’ez.

End recording.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Case #0001703—“Language Acquisition”](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23460664) by [CorvidCastle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorvidCastle/pseuds/CorvidCastle)




End file.
